Waiting for Better Weather

AVUELO has encountered one of the wettest and cloudiest dry seasons in memory. After a series of great acquisitions over core and important areas, our airborne science has stood down for several days with heavy cloud cover. So, what do AVUELO and a Joni Mitchell song have in common? She sings in “Both Sides Now” about how beautiful and enchanting clouds are but concludes:

“But now they only block the sun
They rain and they snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way”

They haven’t snowed on us in Panama, but they have definitely gotten in our way.  Unusual weather, possibly associated with weak La Niña conditions, is resulting in more moisture transport to Panama and Costa Rica and fewer opportunities for flights, though AVUELO’s core areas and critical sites are largely covered. While the aircraft has been in the hangar, the team has met for no-go and planning meetings each day, and the field teams continue to obtain samples at a steady pace. 

During the past few days, canopy trees at several sites, including from tall mature forests and younger stands, as well as samples from mangrove forests, have all come into the lab. Sampling and processing continue even as the aircraft waits for better weather.

Each Friday, the Gamboa-based team hosts a Friday seminar. This past Friday, Andres Baresch presented on pantropical trait retrievals from a partner instrument, PRISMA, from the Italian Space Agency, reprising a talk in Spanish given earlier at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) Panama City HQ, well attended by many STRI scientists working on a range of projects.

A few days ago, Project Scientist Erika Podest and I, with Helena Muller-Landau, AVUELO’s lead scientist from STRI, took several staff from Panama’s Environment Ministry to Barro Colorado Island (BCI). We had an amazing tour of the site where AVUELO was sampling and saw samples being collected from the canopy by skilled forest rangers. We had the chance to see wildlife, birds like the slaty tailed trogon and tinamou, forest deer, and both howler monkeys (well-named) and shy spider monkeys. 

While we were at Barro Colorado, we participated in a NASA Jet Propulsion Laboaratory (JPL) project. Artists at the lab create disks with the name of a field location in Morse code. When a JPLer is at a field location, they press the disk into the ground, and it creates a transient memorial, which we can photograph as part of a collection. Erika and I found a muddy spot by a stream where the soil was soft enough to take the impression and then had to decode the Morse to tell the Barro Colorado disk from a Panama City disk. We pressed it in and took photos, linking BCI, STRI, and JPL in Panama through our collaboration.

To scientists accustomed to temperate forests, the diversity of the tropical forest is overwhelming, as one rarely encounters the same species twice. These forests present an entirely new challenge to imaging spectroscopy, and the precisely located foliar analyses together with coordinated aircraft observations will open a new world of analysis for Earth Observations, with current and ever more spectroscopic missions on orbit to document the changing function of tropical forests with pressure from climate and land use. Knowing there could be hundreds of species per hectare in Panama (more types of trees than in all of North America) was different than seeing the forest and different from seeing the huge variety of leaves passing through the lab.

As I write this, AVUELO is pivoting to marine observations along Costa Rica’s west coast, supported by a new crew, ocean biologists from Costa Rica, and members of NASA’s PACE instrument team, observing the diversity and unique aspects of the tropical ocean. They will report in soon! But, in Panama, for now, we are eager for another one of Joni Mitchell’s song lyrics, “Come to the Sunshine.”